Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17)

by Maurice Leblanc

  She opened the cupboard and found a bottle of port and some biscuits, and as she poured out the wine, she set about relating her expedition to Roche-Périac. She told the story quickly and a trifle incoherently, omitting details and getting them in the wrong order, but for the most part giving them a comic turn which greatly amused the Count and Countess de Chagny.

  “Then,” said the Countess when she came to the end of her story, “the diamonds are lost?”

  “That,” she replied, “is the business of my three cousins. Ask them.”

  During the young girl’s explanations, they had all three stood rather apart, listening to Dorothy, pleasant to their hosts, but wearing an absentminded air, as if they were absorbed in their own thoughts; and those thoughts the Countess must be thinking too, as well as the Count, for there was one matter which filled the minds of all of them and made them ill at ease, till it should be cleared up.

  It was Errington who took the matter up, before the Countess had asked the question; and he said to the young girl:

  “Cousin Dorothy, we don’t understand.... No, we’re quite in the dark; and I think you won’t think us indiscreet if we speak quite openly.”

  “Speak away, Errington.”

  “Ah, well, it’s this — that three hundred thousand francs—”

  “Where did they come from?” said Dorothy ending his sentence for him. “That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes.”

  She bent towards the Englishman’s ear and whispered:

  “All my savings... earned by the sweat of ray brow.”

  “I beg you...”

  “Doesn’t that explanation satisfy you? Then I’ll be frank.”

  She bent towards his other ear, and in a lower whisper still:

  “I stole them.”

  “Oh, don’t joke about it, cousin.”

  “But goodness, George Errington, if I did not steal them, what do you suppose I did do?”

  He said slowly:

  “My friends and I are asking ourselves if you didn’t find them.”

  “Where?”

  “In the ruins of Périac!”

  She clapped her hands.

  “Bravo! They’ve guessed it. You’re right, George Errington, of London: I found them at the foot of a tree, under a heap of dead leaves and stones. That’s where the Marquis de Beaugreval hid his bank-notes and six per cents.”

  The other two cousins stepped forward. Marco Dario, who looked very worried, said gravely: “Be serious, cousin Dorothy, we beg you, and don’t laugh at us. Are we to consider the diamonds lost or found? It’s a matter of great importance to some of us — I admit that it is to me. I had given up hopes of them. But now all at once you let us imagine an unexpected miracle. Is there one?”

  She said:

  “But why this supposition?”

  “Firstly because of this unexpected money which we might attribute to the sale of one of the diamonds. And then... and then... I must say it, because it seems to us, taking it all round, quite impossible that you should have given up the search for that treasure. What? You, Dorothy, after months of conflicts and victories, at the moment you reach your goal, you suddenly decide to stand by with your arms folded! Not a single effort! Not one investigation! No, no, on your part it’s incredible.”

  She looked from one to the other mischievously. “So that according to you, cousins, I must have performed the double miracle of finding the diamonds without searching for them.”

  “There’s nothing you couldn’t do,” said Webster gayly.

  The Countess supported them:

  “Nothing, Dorothy. And I see from your air that you’ve succeeded in this too.”

  She did not say no. She smiled quietly. They were all round her, curious or anxious. The Countess murmured:

  “You have succeeded. Haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Dorothy.

  She had succeeded! The insoluble problem, with which so many minds had wrestled so many times and at such length, for ages — she had solved it!

  “But when? At what moment?” cried George Errington. “You never left us!”

  “Oh, it goes a long way further back than that. It goes back to my visit to the Château de Roborey.”

  “Eh, what? What’s that you say?” cried the astounded Count de Chagny.

  “From the first minute I knew at any rate the nature of the hiding-place in which the treasure was shut up.”

  “But how?”

  “From the motto.”

  “From the motto?”

  “But it’s so plain! So plain that I’ve never understood the blindness of those who have searched for the treasure, and that I went so far as to declare the man who, when concealing a treasure, gave so much information about it, ingenuous in the extreme. But he was right, was the Marquis de Beaugreval. He could engrave it all over the place, on the clock of his château, on the wax of his seals, since to his descendants his motto meant nothing at all.”

  “If you knew, why didn’t you act at once?” said the Countess.

  “I knew the nature of the hiding-place, but not the spot on which it stood. This information was supplied by the gold medal. Three hours after my arrival at the ruins I knew all about it.”

  Marco Dario repeated several times.

  “In robore fortuna.... In robore fortuna.

  And the others also pronounced the three words, as if they were a ‘cabalistic formula, the mere utterance of which is sufficient to produce marvelous results.

  “Dario,” she said, “you know Latin? And you, Errington? And you, Webster?”

  “Well enough,” said Dario, “to make out the sense of those three words — there’s nothing tricky about them. Fortuna means the fortune...”

  “In this case the diamonds,” said she.

  “That’s right,” said Dario; and he continued his translation: “The diamonds are.... in robore...”

  “In the firm heart,” said Errington, laughing.

  “In vigor, in force,” added Webster.

  “And for you three that’s all that the word ‘robore,’ the ablative of the Latin word ‘robur’ means?”

  “Goodness, yes!” they answered. “Robur... force... firmness... energy.”

  She shrugged her shoulders disdainfully:

  “Ah, well, I, who know just about as much Latin as you do, but have the very great advantage over you of being a country girl — to me, when I walk in the country and see that variety of oak which is called the rouvre, it nearly always occurs that the old French word rouvre is derived from the Latin Word ‘robur,’ which means force, and also means oak. And that’s what led me, when on the 12th of July 1. passed, along with you, near the oak, which stands out so prominently in the middle of the clearing, at the beginning of the avenue of oaks — that’s what led me to make the connection between that tree and the hiding-place, and so to translate the information which our ancestor untiringly repeated to us: ‘I have hidden my fortune in the hollow of a rouvre oak.’ There you are. As you perceive, — it’s as simple as winking.”

  Having made her explanation with a charming gayety, she was silent. The three young men gazed at her in wonder and amazement. Her charming eyes were full of her simple satisfaction at having astonished her friends by this uncommon quality, this inexplicable faculty with which she was gifted.

  “You are different,” said Webster. “You belong to a race... a race—”

  “A race of sound Frenchmen, who have plenty of good sense, like all the French.”

  “No, no,” said he, incapable of formulating the thoughts which oppressed all three of them. “No, no. It’s something else.”

  He bent down before her and brushed her hand with his lips. Errington and Dario also bent down in the same respectful act, while, to hide her emotion she mechanically translated:

  “Fortuna, fortune.... In robore, in the oak.” And she added:

  “In the deepest depths of the oak, in the heart of the oak, one m
ight say. There was about six feet from the ground one of those ring-shaped swellings, that scar which wounds in the trunks of trees leave. And I had an intuition that that was the place in which I must search, and that there the Marquis de Beaugreval bad buried the diamonds he was keeping for his second existence. There was nothing else to do but make the test. That’s what I did, during the first few nights while my three cousins were sleeping. Saint-Quentin and I got to work at our exploring with our gimlets and saws and center-bits. And one evening I suddenly came across something too hard to bore. I had not been mistaken. The opening was enlarged and one by one I drew out of it four balls of the size of a hazel-nut. All I had to do was to clear off a regular matrix of dirt to bring to light four diamonds. Here are three of them. The fourth is in pawn with Maître Delarue, who very kindly-agreed, after a good deal of hesitation, and a minute expert examination by his jeweler, to lend me the necessary money till to-morrow.”

  She gave the three diamonds to her three friends, magnificent stones, of the same size, quite extraordinary size, and cut in the old-fashioned way with opposing facets. Errington, Webster, and Dario found it disturbing merely to look at them and handle them. Two centuries before, the Marquis de Beaugreval, that strange visionary, dead of his splendid dream of a resurrection, had intrusted them to the very tree under which doubtless he used to go and lie and read. For two hundred years Nature had continued her slow and uninterrupted work of building walls, ever and ever thicker walls, round the little prison chosen with such a subtle intelligence. For two hundred years generation after generation had passed near this fabulous treasure searching for it perhaps by reason of a confused legend, and now the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of the good man, having discovered the undiscoverable secret, and penetrated to the most mysterious and obscure of caskets, offered them the precious stones which their ancestor had brought back from the Indies.

  “Keep them,” she said. “Three families sprung from the three sons of the Marquis have lived outside France. The French descendants of the fourth son will share the fourth diamond.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Count Octave in a tone of surprise.

  “I say that we are three French heirs, you, Raoul, and I, that each diamond, according to the jeweler’s valuation is worth several millions, and that our rights, the rights of all three of us, are equal.”

  “My right is null,” said Count Octave.

  “Why?” she said. “We are partners. A compact, a promise to share the treasure made you a partner with my father and Raoul’s father.”

  “A lapsed compact!” cried Raoul Davernoie in his turn. “For my part I accept nothing. The will leaves no room for discussion. Four medals, four diamonds. Your three cousins and you, Dorothy; you only have the right to inherit the riches of the Marquis!”

  She protested warmly:

  “And you too, Raoul! You too! We fought together! Your grandfather was a direct descendant of the Marquis! He possessed the token of the medal!”

  “That medal was of no value.”

  “How do you know? You’ve never had it in your hands.”

  “I have.”

  “Impossible. There was nothing in the disc I fished up under your eyes. It was simply a bait to catch d’E’streicher. Then?”

  “When my grandfather came back from his journey to Roche-Périac, where you met him with Juliet Assire, one day I found him weeping in the orchard. He was looking at a gold medal, which he let me take from him and look at. On it were all the indications you have described. But the two faces were canceled by a cross, which manifestly, as I told you, deprived it of all value.”

  Dorothy appeared greatly surprised by this revelation, and she replied in an absent-minded tone:

  “Oh!... really?... You saw? -..”

  She went to one of the windows and stood there for some minutes, her forehead resting against a pane. The last veils which obscured the-adventure were withdrawn. Really there had been two gold medals. One, which was invalid and belonged to Jean d’Argonne, had been stolen by d’Estreicher, recovered by Raoul’s father, and sent to the old Baron. The other, the valid one was the one which belonged to the old Baron, who, out of prudence or greed, had never spoken of it to his son or grandson. In his madness, and dispossessed in his turn of the token, which he had hidden in his dog’s collar, he had gone to win the treasure with the other medal, which he had intrusted to Juliet Assire, and which - d’Estreicher had been unable to find.

  All at once Dorothy saw all the consequences which followed this revelation. In taking from the dog’s collar the medal which she believed to be hers, she had robbed Raoul of his inheritance. In returning to the Manor and offering alms to the son of the man who had been an accomplice in her father’s murder, she had imagined that she was performing an act of generosity and forgiveness, whereas she was merely restoring a small portion of that of which she had robbed him.

  She restrained herself and said nothing. She must act cautiously in order that Raoul might never suspect his father’s crime. When she came from the window to the middle of the room, you would have said that her eyes were full of tears. Nevertheless she was smiling, and she said in a careless tone:

  “Serious business to-morrow. To-day let us rejoice at being reunited and celebrate that reunion. Will you invite me to dinner, Raoul? And my children too?”

  She had recovered all her gayety. She ran to the big gateway of the orchard and called the boys, who came joyfully. The Captain threw himself into the arms of the Countess de Chagny. Saint-Quentin kissed her hand. They observed that Castor and Pollux had swollen noses, signs of a recent conflict.

  The dinner was washed down with sparkling cider and champagne. All the evening Dorothy was lighthearted and affectionate to them all. They felt that she was happy to be alive.

  Archibald Webster recalled her promise to her. It was the next day, the first of August, that she was to choose among her suitors.

  “I stick to my promise,” she said.

  “You will choose among those who are here? For I suppose that cousin Raoul is not the last to come forward as a candidate.”

  “Among those who are here. And as there can be only one chosen, I insist on kissing you all to-night.”

  She kissed the four young men, then the Count and Countess, then the four boys.

  The party did not break up till midnight.

  Next morning Raoul, Octave de Chagny, his wife, and the three strangers were at breakfast in the diningroom when a farm servant brought a letter.

  Raoul looked at the handwriting and murmured gloomily:

  “Ah, a letter from her... Like the last time... She has gone.”

  He remembered, as did the Count and Countess, her departure from Roborey.

  He tore open the letter and read aloud:

  “Raoul, my friend, “I earnestly beg you to believe blindly what I am going to tell you. It was revealed to me by certain facts which I learnt only yesterday.

  “What I am writing is not a supposition, but an absolute certainty. I know it as surely as I know that light exists, and though I have very sound reasons for not divulging the proofs of it, I nevertheless wish you to act and think with the same conviction and serenity as I do myself.

  “By my eternal salvation, this is the truth. Errington, Webster, Dario, and you, Raoul, are the veritable heirs of the Marquis de Beaugreval, specified in his will. Therefore the fourth diamond is yours. Webster will be delighted to go to Nantes tomorrow to give Maître Delarue a check for three hundred thousand francs and bring you bock the diamond. I am sending to Maître Delarue at the some time as the receipt which he signed, the necessary instructions.

  “I will confess, Raoul, that I felt a little disappointed yesterday when I discerned the truth — not much — just a few tears. To-day I am quite contented. I had no great liking for that fortune — too many crimes and too many horrors went with it. Some things I should never have been able to forget And then... and then money is a prison; and I could not be
ar to live locked up.

  “Raoul, and you, my three new friends, you asked me, — rather by way of a joke, wasn’t it? — to choose a sweetheart among those who found themselves at the Manor yesterday. May I answer you in rather the same manner, that my choice is made, that it is only possible for me to devote myself to the youngest of my four boys first, then to the others? Don’t be angry with me, my friends. My heart, up to now, is only the heart of a mother; and it only thrills with tenderness, anxiety and love for them. What would they do if I were to leave them? What would become of my poor Montfaucon? They need me and the really healthy life we lead together. Like them I am a nomad, a vagabond. There is no dwelling-place as good as bur caravan. Let me go back to the high road.

  “And then, after a time we will meet again, shall we? Our cousins the de Chagny will welcome us at Roborey. Come, let us fix a date. Christmas and New Year’s Day there — does that please you?

  “Good-bye, my friend. My best love to you all, and a few tears.... In robore fortuna. Fortune is in the firm heart “I kiss you all.

  “DOROTHY.”

  A long silence followed the reading of this letter.

  At the end of it Count Octave said; “Strange creature! When one considers that she had the four diamonds in her pocket, that is to say ten or twelve million francs, and that it would have been so easy for her to say nothing and keep them.”

  But the young men did not take up this train of thought. For them Dorothy was the very spirit of happiness. And happiness was going away.

  Raoul looked at his watch and beckoned to them to come with him. He led them to the highest point of the Hillocks.

  On the horizon, on a white road which ran upwards among the meadows, the caravan was moving. Three boys walked beside One-eyed Magpie. Saint-Quentin was leading him.

  Behind, all alone, Dorothy — Princess of Argonne and rope-dancer.

  The Eight Strokes of the Clock

  Anonymous translation, 1922

  Originally published in 1922 in Excelsior magazine as a series of eight short stories, this story collection opens with an author’s note claiming that the tales were related to him by Arsène Lupin and that the adventures had actually happened to one Prince Renine. Leblanc implies that Lupin and Renine are one and the same person, but the author suggests to the reader that they must make up their own minds about this. This statement may originate in Leblanc’s unease that his writing of character was in a sense ‘typecast’ by Lupin and that he found it extremely difficult to create and inhabit any other personas. In other words, he felt dogged by Lupin and trapped by his own creation.